Curtis Bacca looked at Cypress Mountain, the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics snowboard cross and ski cross events, the same way he views any groomed slope: as a laboratory.
The Ketchum resident, owner of the Waxroom ski shop, had arrived in Vancouver five days earlier than the Olympic athletes to conduct his experiments. Bacca had two snowboarders come along to act as guinea pigs: halfpipe competitor Shaun White's coach, Bud Keene, and U.S. Snowboarding Team member Alex Deibold. But Cypress had too little snow and too much security to allow Bacca access for his research. He had to find a mountain of similar snow/weather conditions and elevation.
The answer: Snoqualmie, just across the border in Washington.
Bacca tested for days at Snoqualmie. His snowboarding test pilots repeated the same course over and over again ad nauseam. And Bacca jotted finish time after finish time in his notebook. Everything remained the same every run—the rider, the board, the route and the snow. The only variable Bacca allowed was the wax. As results were studied, Bacca fine-tuned his wax mixture in an attempt to cut friction to its minimum.
He would apply the winning wax to the boards of U.S. snowboard cross racers Seth Wescott and Lindsey Jacobellis.
In a sport that separates winners and losers by fractions of a second, Bacca said fast wax makes a difference. And racers need every hair's width of distance between them and the competition.
Bacca is the man pulling hairs, one strand at a time through his repeated experiments.
No simple equation exists for the fastest wax. Everything matters and everything changes. Whether it's snow temperature, air temperature, the angle of the sun during the race, humidity, snow crystal shape and size, speed of the track or sharpness of the snow, Bacca must take it all into account.
"The thing about testing is you can't will the results," he said. "It doesn't lie. I think I'm the only guy in the snowboarding world who tests like that. I definitely geek out."
Bacca said his scientific approach—borderline obsessive-compulsive though it may be—has never failed.
"I can't think of a time where I got it wrong," he said. "For whatever reason, I don't know why, I'm good at making boards go fast. I got a knack."
His track record remained untarnished in Vancouver when Wescott ascended through the pack in the finals, taking gold in men's snowboard cross. Bacca had also waxed for Wescott in the 2006 Torino Olympics when he also won gold. Jacobellis didn't medal, but lost her balance during the semifinals, went off course and was disqualified.
"It was painful," he said, "but I can't do anything about that."
Bacca had also waxed Jacobellis' board during the 2006 Olympics when, many say, she should've won gold but celebrated while landing a jump near the finish line and fell, taking silver.
Still, Bacca's stats speak for themselves. He started waxing in 1990 and, since then, has contributed to 14 X-Games gold medals, including those of Nate Holland. Also, Kyle Rasmussen skied to first place on Bacca's wax in two World Cup downhill races in 1995.
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But are Bacca's racers crossing the finish line first because of the wax, or are they just better, regardless?
It's a question people repeatedly ask him. "How much does that crap really matter?" Bacca said an Associated Press reporter asked him during the Olympics.
Bacca explains it like this: "With a slow board, the rider can ride perfectly and have no chance to win. With a fast board, the rider still needs to ride perfectly, but has a chance to win."
He said this particularly pertains to snowboard cross and isn't as important for superpipe, which isn't speed dependent.
Bacca said that making Wescott and Jacobellis' boards quick was a "nightmare" at Cypress. The mountain, its snow and weather were unusual, to say the least.
"I've only seen Vancouver conditions three times in my career," he said. "On a clear day, you can see the ocean from the start area."
And that doesn't include the Olympics' unnatural conditions of 4.4 million pounds of snow being either trucked or helicoptered in due to lack of snow. Bacca said the snow changes when it's transported and, no matter how careful crews are, gets dirty.
"It was the worst conditions imaginable," he said, adding that the impure snow causes static and drag on boards.
He said the course was hard on the straightaway while the turns were "buttery" soft.
"It was an all-out effort all the time," he said.
And the security of the Olympics only increased the stress.
Bacca would wake up every morning and leave the house at 5:30 a.m. to drive to Cypress. They'd pass through two security checkpoints and then hop on a bus through another checkpoint. A metal detector and equipment is set up as at an airport. And then another bus would be taken to the wax room.
"A two-minute drive was an hour ordeal every day," Bacca said.
At the wax rooms during competitions, Bacca usually had to enforce some security measures of his own to protect his trade secrets. He said he often has to work alongside other teams and people pick up his "tendencies."
And he only uses a mix of two waxes most of the time.
"I put out decoys," he said.
This is particularly important because Bacca wants to keep his edge for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. He'll be returning with Wescott, who has hired Bacca for sole access to his magical waxy ways.
"It's a little early to be talking three-peat, but ..." Bacca said.
Ironically, 40-something-year-old Bacca—as he refers to himself—didn't even start snowboarding until 2006. He grew up as a skier.
Trevon Milliard: tmilliard@mtexpress.com
Wax technician Curtis Bacca, right, waxed the snowboard of Seth Wescott, left, during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Wescott won gold in snowboard cross, an event in which he also won gold at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, with assistance from Bacca.
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